It's time for a new poll. Following Apple's quarterly earnings call, where the company announced selling 4 million Macs in the last quarter (see Macworld's discussion of Apple's earnings), this could be a good time to find out which model Mac OS X Hints readers prefer. Will it turn out that laptops are popular with readers of this site? They represent 70% of Apple's sales. Or is the Mac Pro still a favorite?

You can vote in the poll, and feel free to post comments on that page about why you selected a specific model.

If you want a desktop machine that you will use for routine purposes (internet, mail, word and data processing, routine graphics and video, etc.), the Mac Mini gives you a lot of computing power for a low price. Simply put, it's economical.

If I could have a MacBook Air with upgradeable memory (to 8GB or 16GB), I think it would be a perfect machine. Light, fast, small, able to connect to external devices with high bandwidth via Thunderbolt--yup, I'd buy it.

Though it's a losing battle to vote for such a machine due to the sheer percentage of faces that weren't around back then, I too have to put in a good word for my trusty old IIci, "WatusiEye." Stretched its life out as long as I could with a Daystar Rocket and other tricks.

It may not have been the speed demon, storage warehouse, Internet devourer or panoramic display marvel that my 3.4GHz/16GB/SSD/2TB Sandy Bridge iMac is, or the all-round useful, Swiss Army knife, sexy tool my Air is, but for pure computing gestalt user interaction pleasure nothing has ever topped it. And probably never will. Your Mac used to be your buddy in a way someone who's only used OS X, or even who picked up at System 8 or 9, could never understand. ResEdit forever!

It also probably had something to do with the size of the gap between it and any other alternatives available on the market at the time...

New poll: Which is your favorite Mac?
Authored by: MacPro2007 on May 02, '12 11:09:58AM

Great post. Likewise: I loved the Apple LCII I spotted at a yard sale ($55). I lugged it home, turned it on and everything was perfect. I was delighted to see someone had upgraded the hard drive to 500 MB! ("Insane!") LOL! - I then got hold of a RAM upgrade - took that baby to somewhere around 12 MB!! I also went over to the university library (Umich) and went back in their microfiche files to 1993 where I discovered a newspaper ad showing the original retail price ($1244, as I recall).

The years fly by: In 2000, I bought my first new Mac (iMac DV, 400 Mhz processor, 10 GB HD). Later bought a new eMac - which lasted years. Finally: I got my Dream Machine - 2007 Mac Pro. But I also bought a MacBook in 2010: just to have a "hub" for wireless devices and video chat with FaceTime. Oh, well, I later bought a fully tricked out MacBook Pro for my son-in-law, he had only a rickety Windows laptop for work and home.

I wanted to say the Mac Pro, as towers have always been my favorite Mac, but Apple hasn't made any effort to keep the starting price point under or around $2,000, they haven't updated the design in too long (or even at least speed bumped it), no USB 3, and no Thunderbolt options—it's missing lots of features that make hackintoshing seem so tempting.

So I went MacBook Pro, as I love my 13", and look forward to getting a 15" soon (screw Lion and Mt Lion, I'm getting a 15" 2011 MacBook Pro and putting Snow Leopard on it!)

The Cube really was a beautiful Mac!!
My boss had one; it had all the bugs of the time (intermittent shut-downs because of the excess heat; little cracks in the plastic near the screws; super-loud hard-drive that defeated the point of not having a fan...)

But it was, and, really, still is, such a beautiful machine!

Someone should create an upgrade with MacBook parts like an Intel MLB and a flash-drive....

I had a Wallstreet 250 for years and years. Upgraded to 292(? I think it was...) and installed a bigger screen and a MCE cdrom burner as well as the hardware to play DVDs, and then upgraded it to a G4. I still have it though the G4 chip is failing. I loved that computer.
Nowdays I'm partial to my 17" macbook pro.

New poll: Which is your favorite Mac?
Authored by: MacPro2007 on May 02, '12 10:45:54AM

My favorite: Mac Pro. Simply because I got tired of the limits in expandability, CPU, hard drive and graphics cards in iMacs. I DO understand that iMacs fit the needs & desires of the majority, that's not derogatory toward them.

Besides, when Apple issues one of their rare firmware upgrades, the firmware fan test makes the MacPro's fans roar like a jet and blow at maximum force: sending papers and any other light objects swirling in the air around the room - just like some kinds of cgi manifestations in the movies! Yay!!
;-)

Which is my favorite: MacBook Air
Authored by: Bold_Sue on May 02, '12 01:45:27PM

This was a difficult decision as I love both my iMac (desktop) and my Macbook Air (laptop). To me they are a pair and I use either one of these depending on WHAT I am doing or WHERE I want to do it. It is easier to explain the WHERE first. Since I spend part of the year in Canada and the other part in a warmer country, of course it is the laptop that I take with me. Prior to leaving, I "pack" (copy) the files I want to take with me: financials, music, photos, just a few family videos. While away from home, the laptop holds my vacation photos, videos, eBooks, Audio Books, Skype and acts as my feed to a TV, my iPad and iPhone. When I am home and also away from home, the laptop allows me to do nearly everything I can do on the desktop wherever I want to sit, inside or outdoors. My continuing problem with the laptop is running out of internal disk space although I have 128GB. When I return home, I "unpack" (copy files to iMac) my laptop.

Now for the WHAT I use the laptop for at home. To save myself some work when I pack and leave, I go to the laptop when I want to download eBooks and movies. I also use the laptop to feed entertainment to the TV since it is portable. I do a lot of my Web searches/research while I put my feet up on the couch.

My iMAC is where I keep all my important files, photos, videos that I don't want to lose and keep these backed up to my Time Machine and MobileMe. I am a paying client that will absolutely hate to lose the Gallery portion of MobileMe during the iCloud conversion as it was my offsite backup. I do most of my video building, photo editing, craft printing and financials on my desktop. It is my work horse when I need heavy processing power or a large screen or I hate to say but it also runs a Windows OS via Virtual Box when I need it.

So there it is. A difficult choice between these 2 machines as they go together like a pea in a pod.

New poll: Which is your favorite Mac?
Authored by: wozjob on May 05, '12 07:14:20PM

Has to be my trusty Quicksilver 2002 (933 G4).
Though it's more than 10yrs. old it still runs like a champ. The original HD crashed at 9 yrs. I had to re-install my Adobe apps on the new HD which required booting into OS9 so that I could install the original apps (ai 4.0 & ps 3.5) and then run through the subsequent upgrades to get to OSX. Around 6/11 it was giving me fits, boot chime no video, then no boot chime - nothing. I tried everything I could including a new battery but she wouldn't go. I was planning on buying a new imac anyway so I bought a new mid 2011 21.5' 2.5 imac. I cloned the HD w/10.5 over to a partition on the new machine so I could still use ai 10 & ps CS via Rosetta. A couple weeks later I figured what the heck lets see if she'll boot up. Hazah it lives!! I put the old "crashed" original HD back in on whim and although it made a lot of racket I could read & write to it. I love that machine!!!!